Title Nine Last Days on Planet Earth Series --- Author Daryl Gregory Cover Art Keith Negley Publisher Tor.com - 2018 First Printing Tor.com - 2018 Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters LT Main Elements Aliens Website Tor.com Originals

When the seeds rained down from deep space, it may have been the first stage of an alien invasion--or something else entirely. How much time do we have left, and do we even understand what timescale to use? As a slow apocalypse blooms across the Earth, planets and plants, animals and microbes, all live and die and evolve at different scales. Is one human life long enough to unravel the mystery?

LT is just a boy when a meteor shower turned into something more, what seemed to be some kind of alien seeding of the planet Earth. As the years pass more and more strange plants sprout from the ground. Humans try to fight them off, but invasive species are tenacious and they start to take over the native flora. It's against the law to keep such plants but LT's mother can't resist keeping a "fern man" in a pot, and this inspires LT on his career of learning about these new species and travelling the world to learn more about them.

Wait you say, how does that happen in just nine days? Well, no one said the days were consecutive! As we travel through LT's life we see him fall in love, have children, see them grow up and have children of their own. This isn't a story of alien invasion, this is the story of the life of one man and his desire to find his place in the world, to have just a small piece of happiness to surround himself. There is joy and there is sorrow, there are blessings and there are losses. And woven through this individual's life is the mystery of the alien plants and why were they sent to us, what were they for. Are they there to take over our world, to prepare it for invasion? Or perhaps, just maybe, they were a gift...a gift of beauty. For what better kind of gift is there.

I truly enjoyed every moment reading this story, one can see why it was nominated for a Hugo award.